Word: cults
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Nancie Brown lost her son David Moore to the cult when he was 19. "My friends said, 'He'll be back in a couple of months,' but 21 years later he hadn't come back," she says. He came home only twice during that time, and she sought solace with other cultists' families, even publishing a newsletter for a while. But Brown grew almost accepting of her son's choice, realizing that the group had become her son's community. "About two dozen of those who died had been in the group for two decades. They had a simple life...
...Cult experts warn that the public should not be taken in by the cheerful departures, nor by the notion that it was a small number of people exercising their own free will. "I don't consider it suicide. I consider it murder," says Janja Lalich, a cult expert who has been monitoring Heaven's Gate since 1994, when several distraught parents contacted her with their worries about their missing children. "[Applewhite] controlled it, he called the shots. These people were pawns in his personal fantasy." But Marshall Herff Applewhite has died with his followers. And they seemed so happy...
...more information, a mirror of the cult's Website and continuous updates, see time.com and pathfinder.com
Quite a mess. But no longer perhaps a complete surprise. Eighteen years after Jonestown, suicide cults have entered the category of horrors that no longer qualify as shocks. Like plane crashes and terrorist attacks, they course roughly for a while along the nervous system, then settle into that part of the brain reserved for bad but familiar news. As the bodies are tagged and the families contacted, we know what the experts will say before they say it. That in times of upheaval and uncertainty, people seek out leaders with power and charisma. That the established churches are too fainthearted...
...nation where faith of whatever kind is a force to be reckoned with. But a free proliferation of raptures is upon us, with doctrines that mix the sacred and the tacky. The approach of the year 2000 has swelled the ranks of the fearful and credulous. On the Internet, cults multiply in service to Ashtar and Sananda, deities with names you could find at a perfume counter, or to extraterrestrials--the Zeta Reticuli, the Draconian Reptoids--who sound like softball teams at the Star Wars cantina. Carl Raschke, a cult specialist at the University of Denver, predicts "an explosion...